The plot seems to thicken every day now on the infamous “missing emails” from IRS manager Lois Lerner. So only did Lerner’s emails disappear in an alleged “computer crash,” but so did six other IRS officials at the center of the IRS targeting scandal. Now comes news that the IRS actually disposed of Lerner’s hard drive making any data retrieval that more difficult.

Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightning rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources.

“We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa issued a terse statement following the POLITICO report Wednesday night:

“If the IRS truly got rid of evidence in a way that violated the Federal Records Act and ensured the FBI never got a crack at recovering files from an official claiming a Fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination , this is proof their whole line about ‘losing’ e-mails in the targeting scandal was just one more attempted deception. Old and useless binders of information are still stored and maintained on federal agency shelves; official records, like the e-mails of a prominent official, don’t just disappear without a trace unless that was the intention.”

Earlier this week, Issa subpoenaed the damaged hard drive hoping to retrieve the lost emails with assistance from tech experts. The news that the hard drive was disposed of will ramp up suspicions of an agency or White House cover-up to the IRS targeting scandal.

Issa tweeted further thoughts on Thursday afternoon.

If the #IRS got rid of evidence & violated the Federal Records Act, this is proof that “losing” emails was just attempted deception.

The IRS told congressional investigators last Friday that Lerner’s emails from 2009 to 2011 were lost when her computer crashed.

The timing of the missing emails is critical because the IRS began targeting conservative and Tea Party groups in early 2010. Congressional investigators believe evidence from the “lost Lerner emails” may show a political directive to target conservatives — something the Obama Administration has denied from the start.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air notes that the national news media, eager to crucify President Nixon over an 18-minute recording gap, are barely attentive to this massive loss of evidence.

Forty years ago, aggressive media investigation into executive-branch abuse of power — including the use of the IRS against political opponents — forced the only resignation of a US President in history. Today, the media seems a lot more interested in whether an obvious abuse of power against an administration’s political opponents has a high Q-rating, or whether we should give the IRS even more resources after this scandal.

Maybe WikiLeaks could do the job that the Obama Administration seems unable to do.

Comments

Isn’t there a solution – subpoena the keepers of the records, the administrators of the servers, demanding copies of their files.

Over the past week we’ve heard from IT pros galore that an individually crashed hard drive, even 6 of them, is an irrelevancy since all pre-crash data is routinely backed-up. Even the stories of the IRS’s data guys working on her hard drive, saying “we can’t recover anything,” really makes for bad acting b/c no one is going to spend lots of time trying to retrieve data from an iffy hard drive when all the data can be obtained readily from the back-ups. This is all for public consumption.

To quote Larry Price: “Repeat after me: Emails are not stored on “Hard Drives”; they are stored on “servers”. If your computer crashes, you log onto another computer and access your e-mail. E-mail is not dependent on the workstation. […] [06/19] Video: Tea-Party Attorney: IRS Lying About Missing Lois Lerner Emails”

Issa responded to the latest news with a blistering statement rebuking the IRS for destroying evidence vital to his investigation.

If the IRS truly got rid of evidence in a way that violated the Federal Records Act and ensured the FBI never got a crack at recovering files from an official claiming a Fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination, this is proof their whole line about “losing” e-mails in the targeting scandal was just one more attempted deception. Old and useless binders of information are still stored and maintained on federal agency shelves; official records, like the e-mails of a prominent official, don’t just disappear without a trace unless that was the intention.

Here is the problem. The IRS claimed that it was keeping 6 months of tapes of the email on its servers, but that the tapes were recycled before they were asked for, or something like that. But, what they were apparently archiving, to the best of my understanding, were the emails that had not been deleted, but remained on their servers, and, also some of the sent email. What they apparently were not doing, that most companies do, is journaling the email traffic, and then archiving the journals.

But, they also pointed out that a lot of employees (and I am one of those, but not with the IRS) move a lot of their email out of their inbox folder on the server, into local folders on their hard drive. And, that was what was potentially on Lerner’s hard drive – the email that she moved from the email server, and had stored in local files on her hard drive. Because whether or not there was a copy on the server at some point in the past was irrelevant, since those archive tapes had been recycled.

Of course, it was suspicious enough that not only were they not journaling the email traffic, and they had recycled the server archive tapes (they now apparently just store them indefinitely), but her hard drive had crashed. And, then it turns out that they had discarded the hard drive (since much of the data on most crashed hard drives can be recovered), and 4 or 5 other hard drives had similarly crashed presumably containing incriminating, or at least interesting, emails.

You know, even if all that was true, it’d expose the perpetrators responsible to civil and criminal penalties under multiple federal statutes and policies mandating proper record keeping, with a good number being contractors being paid big bucks to do this right.

That concept leves the obvious ‘out’ for any IRS employee who doesn’t want ANY given set of emails to be seen – copy them to your own HD, and implicitly delete them from server, and thus from all future backups.

IOW, each employee can delete anything they want any time they want, just by copying to their own machine (which then can erase or destroy at will later) and it’s gone.

Where messages are stored depends on how the recipient is reading them. If reading them as webmail, via a browser, the messages stay on the ISP’s server. If reading them as old-fashioned e-mail, with a non-Web-based e-mail program, they are downloaded from the ISP before being read, and stored locally on the recipient’s hard drive. At least that’s how my e-mails are stored.

If those mail are seriously gone. They were not lost, they were DELETED. Today’s technology saves and backs up everything. Wasn’t Lois required by law to keep hard-copies of all her emails? Whatever. “Day 406” and still not accountability. Disgusting. They all suck including the GOP for tolerating more than a year of delays and obfuscation by IRS bureaucratic fascists.

On another site, a commenter claimed his company had been in the running for a new IRS contract dealing with the servers and computers. He says in the specs for the contract it was explained that emails were backed up not only on servers and local drives, but also at an off-site location which also had to be maintained as part of a contract.